The Word and God

I recently read some things in G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker’s book on Ludwig Wittgenstein that reaffirmed in my mind part of what we do in biblical theology. Baker and Hacker summarized some of Wittgenstein’s starting thoughts, where he pondered Augustine’s notions of language like this:

The essence of language: namely, that words name objects and that sentences are combinations of names. This primitive picture of naming as the foundation of language displays the seed from which numerous philosophical conceptions of language and linguistic meaning grow. . . .every word has a meaning, the meaning is correlated with the word, it is the object the word stands for. Sentences are essentially complex, composed of words in appropriate combination. . . . central to this Augustinian conception is also the idea that language is connected with reality, i.e. that words (names) are endowed with meaning by means of word-world connections. So ostensive definition of primitive terms is conceived to be the fundamental form of explanation of word-meaning, and it is taken to be the point at which names are linked to things. (8)

From this section Baker and Hacker then began a literal “Exegesis” of Wittgenstein and his writings in order to explore what that thinker more fully felt and therefore meant.

When people study the Bible, especially in the area of higher education, we might want to have some form of this word picture in mind as to what we are doing. While there are numerous philosophical concepts of how people think and obtain meaning, in biblical studies a person cannot go far without resorting to some Greek or Hebrew expression having certain ranges of meaning.

Each explorer of the biblical texts are trying to conceive of the objects “that words name” and explore the meaning that these “words in appropriate combination” have. While Baker and Hacker tried to intricately ferret out the meaning of a person in recent years, the student of the Bible has a different task.

When we see a string of Greek or Hebrew words, we have to struggle first with the fact that they are of another language than that we currently use. But, if Augustine and Wittgenstein were on to something, these words were placed and ordered for a purpose. This purpose is part of the meaning. Looking at one word, seeing what experts in that language have said that it does or could mean in our language, is nice but the sentence is more than one word. The context of the time it was written in has some bearing in the meaning and even the word order.

But whose meaning are we finding? Are we more concerned with the persons of such as Moses, David, Isaiah, and Daniel or the God that spoke to them, inspiring, sometimes commanding them, to write? Luke Timothy Johnson described the New Testament writings in human terms, after making allowance for competing ranges of view, “I mean at the simplest level that the writings must be taken seriously as fully human productions. Divine inspiration is not excluded, but inspiration is not a fact available for study” (5, emphasis his).

I understand Johnson’s discussion, but I personally fit in the group he calls “supernaturalists.” As Johnson describes, in part, “the NT looks like the OT because it has the same author, God. The human writers were passive recipients of the divine impuse, secretaries taking down dictation” (3). I don’t know how passive an Isaiah was when watching Hezekiah spread a letter on the altar in asking for a rescue from Assyrians (2 Chronicles 32), or a David after watching his child die in punishment for his sin could then write something such as Psalm 51, yet as the human part was present the divine part cannot be divorced.

Certainly, John and Paul had a part, but definitely God did too. As we search through biblical words for meaning, not all meaning was for the prophet and the people of his time. The prophets themselves sometimes had to ask what this meant or why that was hidden. But if God had not intended a message beyond that of men in their assorted problems, then those like Ezra or Luke would have labored inconsequentially and there would be no worth for us to read today.

Search the words for Ezekiel’s meaning, or Hosea or James, read your mechanical translations and ask the One who made you if there is more. It may surprise you how often the answer is “Yes.”



Baker, G. P., and P. M. S. Hacker. Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning. 2nd edition. Vol. 1. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Johnson, Luke Timothy, and Todd C. Penner. The Writings of the New Testament. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1999.

Democracy and People

Someone asked a question recently about a word we were describing in a textbook. There are those interesting moments when something in one language looks very much like another word in a different language. In this case a Greek word, δημον, or as commonly transliterated dēmon or daemon, looked distractingly like something very different in English, which most readers have already surmised at this point.

R. W. Browne said that this term for a group of people “combined the good and bad points in the character of a populace, with the distinguishing features of an educated deliberative assembly” (p. 361). Notice the "deliberative assembly," we were talking about democracy in action, and the action word was rooted in dēmon. Kurt Raaflaub wrote an interesting article called "The Breakthough of Dēmokratia" and others such as Eric Robinson gave some description of the concept at work as well (see note 68 on page 55 of his book).

In the formation of this country we adopted the terms "Assembly" and even "Congress" to borrow from the classical "deliberative" bodies in antiquity. In the largely forgetable movie of the stage play 1776, there was a wonderful moment when one of the founding fathers of the United States turned his head to the sky to address God, saying essentially that he permits us to cope with things like famine and pestilance, "But Congress? That's not fair!"

When you read through the book of Acts, think that some of those words like "crowd" or even "mob" are presented to you in translation of some form of the word dēmon. Thinking of the expression and some of our "deliberative assemblies" I can't help but think that this is a God-given pun at times. (This is about as political as I intend to get)


Robert William Browne. History of Classical Literature: Greek Literature. http://books.google.com/books?id=uPwQAAAAIAAJ

F. D. Morice. Stories in Attic Greek. http://books.google.com/books?id=GYkCAAAAQAAJ [see page 153, for δημος as “the people, the commons”]

Kurt A. Raaflaub, Josiah Ober, and Robert W. Wallace. Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece. http://books.google.com/books?id=6qaSHHMaGVkC

Eric Robinson. The First Democracies. http://books.google.com/books?id=T1kfcobFRSMC

Francis Edward Thompson. Syntax of Attic Greek. http://books.google.com/books?id=GfEIAAAAQAAJ

S. C. Woodhouse. English-Greek Dictionary. http://books.google.com/books?id=UR2bLaOYhucC [For "assembly" see sustrophe and ekklesia; for "crowd" see ochlos and plethos; for "body" see δίμας]